Article

Apple’s spotlighted OS X iPhone applications: the updated list

By Jeremy Horwitz ● Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Over the course of two public presentations—first, its iPhone Software Roadmap Event on March 6, 2008, and second, the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9, 2008—Apple has spotlighted a number of different applications for the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod touch. Though these applications vary considerably in purpose and likelihood of general release, we’ve assembled a complete list of what was shown for curious readers and developers to consider. Some of the applications are definitely going to be released; others may serve as inspirations to companies looking for ideas Apple considered worth including on stage. A large list of web applications for the iPhone can be found on iLounge, as well.

Apple-Demonstrated iPhone Applications on March 6, 2008

Ten applications were shown on stage by Apple’s Scott Forstall and five third-party companies. The applications range from pure demonstrations to early versions of sure-to-be-released titles, as described further below.

AOL Instant Messenger for iPhone: Native to the iPhone rather than running off of a more limited web-based interface, AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM) for iPhone is the closest thing to Apple’s IM program iChat yet seen for the device. Using a sophisticated Buddy List with buddy icons and current status, AIM lets you update your online profile and photo directly from the iPhone, conduct multiple conversations that can be swipe-gestured through, and use emoticons. A Bonjour icon at the bottom of the screen—used by iChat to figure out buddies who are available for audio and video conferencing—was not demonstrated or explained. Likely to be available to users, price and date yet to be determined.

Apple App Store: A dedicated application designed to provide downloadable access to all iPhone and iPod touch software from Apple’s servers. Based upon the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, the App Store program presents Featured apps (Just Added and Staff Favorites), a list of categories, Top 50 apps, search, and updates features. Downloading is supported via cell or Wi-Fi wireless. Updates tracks updates to applications to let you download improved versions of applications, immediately. Guaranteed to be available to users in June; free for iPhone users, and for a “nominal” fee for iPod touch users.

Apple’s Hello World: A demonstration application designed to show off the ease of coding an iPhone application and transferring it to a live iPhone for testing and tweaking. Unlikely to be available to users.

Apple’s Photo Editor: This unnamed demonstration application was shown to demonstrate coding of iPhone applications, and featured Contrast, Saturation, and Exposure slider controls, an Auto-Enhance switch, and an “Advanced” menu. These features, found in Apple’s iPhoto, would presumably enable photos taken with the iPhone or stored in its database to be tweaked before use or e-mailing. It is unclear whether Apple will integrate these editor features into the current Photos application—the most likely scenario—or whether they’ll be put into a separate app, or discarded.

Apple’s Touch FX: A demonstration application designed to show off iPhone’s video hardware and developer access to its database of stored content, specifically taking a random photo from the Photos application and allowing the user to deform it with touch and pinch gestures. Unlikely to be available to users in demonstrated form, but possibly the basis of an iPhone Photo Booth-style application yet to be announced.

Apple’s Touch Fighter: A demonstration game based somewhat on Nintendo’s StarFox and Namco’s Starblade, designed to show off accelerometer-based steering and touchscreen-based button pressing, along with the iPhone’s OpenGL software and 3-D graphics hardware, plus its OpenAL positional audio. Running at roughly 30 frames per second, Touch Fighter lets you steer a starfighter and shoot at ships launched from a battleship floating above a planet. Likely to be available to users.

Electronic Arts’ Spore: A portable device optimized version of the company’s Will Wright-developed life simulator, enabling you to start with a primitive creature and build it up with body parts to evolve. The demonstration featured touchscreen-based customization of your spore character and accelerometer based movement of the character within 2-D bodies of water. Eighteen levels long, the game has been announced for a September release in some form, at an unknown price.

Epocrates Drug Reference Application: Designed for medical professionals, this application consisted of several pieces, a Drug Lookup table with photos, dosing, drug formulation information, warnings, adverse reactions, and other details; MultiCheck, which lets physicians determine whether harmful interactions will result from adding a new medication to a patient who is already on other medications; and Identify Drug, which lets you enter several characteristics of a drug into the Epocrates RX system to find matching medications. This is likely to actually be released; Epocrates states that it will be free.

Salesforce.com Salesforce Automation (SFA) Application: This demonstration application has a number of tools for employees handling sales for a company. One screen shows the day’s activities on a schedule, providing a graph of progress towards monthly sales goals, while other screens include sortable lists of sales opportunities, presentation of new sales lead data that has been pushed to the phone from the company’s servers, and instant access to the Google Maps to visit a sales lead in person. This application is likely to actually be released, date unknown.

Sega’s Super Monkey Ball: Based upon the Nintendo GameCube title, this demonstration game has you pilot a monkey inside of a ball through a series of mazes, collecting bananas to rack up extra lives. The game’s key features are smooth 3-D graphics and game console-like sound, plus iPhone accelerometer-based controls. Developed by Other Ocean, this game is very likely to actually be released, date unknown.

In the Xcode portion of the Scott Forstall demonstration of iPhone application development, a collection of iPhone games was shown in an opened folder alongside separate collections of Productivity Apps and Utilities, which were closed. The titles listed were:

MyGame was highlighted to demonstrate a work in progress title being developed by a phantom programmer, and its folder was later shown alongside a photo editing application, as well as separately in a performance analysis application. The other titles on the list were most likely just mockups. However, they do illustrate game categories considered viable by Apple: space shooting, Breakout, casino games, classic arcade games, pen and pencil games, fantasy games, driving games, and action games.

Ten additional applications were shown during Steve Jobs’ demonstration of the App Store, all of which appeared to be completely made up for the purpose of highlighting how the store would look when populated by third-party applications. As with the applications in the Scott Forstall Xcode demonstration, these are very unlikely to be actually released, but they may illustrate applications Apple considers to be viable for third-party development. Each application is listed separately below, along with the App Store’s associated price.

Sega’s Super Monkey Ball: Sega showed a more complete version of the Super Monkey Ball game originally unveiled during March’s iPhone Software Roadmap event. The final version of the game will feature 110 stages, all four of the classic monkey characters, and will sell for $9.99.

eBay: A native iPhone application for connecting to and browsing the online auction service. It will let users bid on, track, and search auctions directly from their iPhone, as well as offer access to their “My eBay” page. The application is fully integrated with eBay’s servers, and will be available for free through the App Store.

Loopt: A social networking application that uses the iPhone’s Core Location features to show where people are, what they’re doing, and what’s available nearby, and will enable users to use calling, text messaging, or pinging to contact friends. Loopt will be free at launch of App Store.

SixApart’s TypePad for iPhone: Blogging software company Six Apart’s native application for its hosted blogging service TypePad. TypePad on iPhone allows users to create and edit posts, and snap and upload pictures. The app will be free at App Store launch.

The Associated Press’ Mobile News Network: A native iPhone application which will offer much of the functionality found in the AP’s current iPhone web app, along with new features such as access to videos and translucent overlays on top of photos. The AP’s Mobile News Network application will be a free download from the App Store.

Pangea Software’s Cro-Mag Rally: A 3-D caveman racing game featuring nine different tracks and 11 cars to choose from. Using the accelerometer, the iPhone acts as the steering wheel. Cro-Mag Rally will sell for $9.99 at the launch of the App Store.

Pangea Software’s Enigmo: A physics based puzzle game which challenges players to drop water into buckets be solving various puzzles. The game will offer 15 different levels and an entirely touch based control scheme with particle animations in the visuals. It will cost $9.99 and be available at the launch of the App Store.

Cow Music’s Band: A new music application from England-based insurance industry developer Mark Terry. Band features virtual instruments that let you create music on your iPhone from scratch. It offers a two octave piano, with touch keys, funky drummer, a touch-based drum set that lets you make beats, a 12 bar simplified blues guitar, a bass guitar for backing tracks called Bassist, and other instruments, like a synthesizer. Users can record, overdub, and mix the various parts together into a song. No pricing for Band has been announced; it should be available in a few weeks.

Major League Baseball’s MLB.com: A native application for accessing content from MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball. The app will offer features like At Bat, which has all today’s games, with details on who is currently on base, pitching, and what the line score is, and realtime video highlights — clips are shown live during the game, not after it, over WiFi or EDGE. No price has been set for the application, which will be offered in the App Store at launch.

Modality’s medical learning applications: A new series of applications intended to help medical students learn. The applications will serve as high-tech stand-ins for traditional flash cards and atlases, using the Netter Collection’s gold standard anatomy photos to help people learn all the regions of the body. Users can scan all of the parts of the body with map-style pins that note what they’re seeing, can do quizzes based on the parts they see, and more. A dozen apps will be available within weeks of App Store launch, with more coming by the end of the year.

MimVista’s Medical imaging app: Allows users to look at animated radiological imaging data. Users can zoom into the images and look at how parts of the body change in recorded realtime. Users can also do measurements. Will be available at the App Store’s launch, pricing unknown.

Digital Legends Entertainment’s Kroll:. An adventure game that seems like a mix between Tomb Raider and Ninja Gaiden. It features cinematic effects and full 3-D polygon art, and will be ready by September of this year. Price unknown.

Apple’s NearbyFriends: A sample application created on stage by Scott Forstall to show off the iPhone SDK’s toolkit. Not likely to be released on its own, but similar functionality will appear in other iPhone applications.

The Iconfactory’s Twitteriffic: While not demonstrated on stage, an iPhone version of popular Mac OS X Twitter client Twitteriffic has been shown in App Store screenshots on Apple’s web site. The application offers direct access to Twitter, including posting and viewing friends’ posts. Listed as Free in the screenshots; release date unknown.

2

All of the gee-whiz apps are cool. I love the AP thing, and TypePad might get me blogging, but I hope developers don’t overlook more prosaic things, so I can finally mothball my Palm. I’d _really_ like to see a good mileage log, with similar functionality to Trip Deluxe on the Palm. I could also use a non-Web 2.0 currency converter. Think about it. If I’m in Kyrgyzstan, a Web-based converter isn’t worth squat.

Posted by orgel in Falls Church, VA on June 11, 2008 at 5:26 PM (CDT)

3

Speaking of Palm, does anyone make a good Palm to iPhone conversion utility for at least the contacts, calendar, and memos? I’ve had Palm OS devices back to early 1997, so that’s way too much history to leave behind.

One other Palm app I couldn’t leave behind is eReader, since I’ve spent too much on electronic books through them.

Posted by Mike on June 11, 2008 at 9:14 PM (CDT)

4

Screen Capture is already in 1.1.4 and merely needs to be enabled! Do a Google search for it.

Posted by odysseus on June 12, 2008 at 9:27 AM (CDT)

5

You can convert your palm contacts through exporting them as vcards, or, if needed, a tab-delimited text file. Address Book will import those files (It may even import the Palm db file directly!)

eReader is up to those folks, but I’ll bet they get on board. unless there’s some dumb DRM problem…

Posted by Alex Johnson on June 12, 2008 at 10:05 AM (CDT)

6

I hope someone will create a cooking / shopping list application with the ability to browse and search AllRecipes.com recipes (with their rating), with the ability to bookmark/save favorite recipes, and the ability to add the ingredients of a particular recipe to the shopping list.

When showing the ingredients of a recipe, I figure there would be a button for ‘add all’ and ‘add selected,’ with checkmark boxes next to each ingredient. You’d click to add a checkmark next to each ingredient in the recipe, then click add to add those ingredients to your shopping list.

Posted by Ken F on June 28, 2008 at 12:36 PM (CDT)

7

A nice application for logging time would be a great plus for anyone who charges by the hour or needs to calculate total time worked for the day, week, or month. Great products exist for the Palm community, so I hope a similar product could be made available.

Posted by Dick S on July 6, 2008 at 1:41 AM (CDT)

8

Anyone know of an application to send images with text? Thanks if so….